Main Trope Overdosed Discussion

Okay, some of this may seem like nitpicking, and I'm not familiar with most of the franchises in question beyond what I read about them on TV Tropes, but some of the changes The Fantasy Chronicler has made to what works fall under what franchises are completely inscrutable to me. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time including links to Majora's Mask, which, near as I can tell, is the only game to be considered a direct sequel of another in this way (after removing Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks from Wind Waker's count... which he'd added in the first place)? Not including the Looney Tunes characters as part of the Looney Tunes franchise? Excluding Family Guy Presents: Laugh It Up, Fuzzball from the main show's count?

Some of the changes are defensible but aren't clearly superior to what they replaced, pointing to a difference in philosophies compared to whoever set things up originally, namely: including the individual Beatles in the band's count (as well as non-member Yoko Ono - although removing the "discography" from the commented-out note is less defensible); summing up the entries for the "main series" of video game franchises rather than leaving each one in their own entry (namely Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Halo); under the Nasuverse, removing the "Fate series" superentry and apparently merging all its members under the Fate/stay night banner (which is in a way, both consistent and inconsistent with the main-series item). Even the ones I've called out aren't necessarily completely indefensible, but I would like to get some sense of where they're coming from, especially since some of the reasons that come to my mind might not be appropriate or have better solutions (and it's also true that this page has never really had explicit, consistent standards for how and when certain works are included in a larger franchise or sub-franchise).

Should we merge all the DC, Marvel, Disney Animated Canon, TGWTG, and Universal and Hammer horror into their respected verses or franchises?

GrafVonTirol

07:53:33 PM Jun 2nd 2017edited by GrafVonTirol

No. In the case of the former two, they may have a vast shared universe but other than that tend to stand on their own. When the works within the company cross over, that warrants a separate entry (eg The Avengers; perhaps a Marvel Cinematic Universe entry while not counting any films or series towards the other entries [like the Captain America films would count for MCU but not Captain America for example]) Works in Disney Animated Canon are not necessarily connected to each other (I'd only lump a DAC movie with another DAC movie if the latter is a sequel). I also consider it a stretch to lump the rest of those listed in the same category to be honest.

I think this page is getting indiscriminate and cluttered. I propose raising the thresholds for inclusion. The simplest solution – doubling them all – would look something like this: Sandbox.Trope Overdosed March 2017. It would probably look slightly different as I haven't redone any of the counts, but that should give you a rough idea.

I personally don't like it. The 9000 category contains very few entries, and is sandwiched between two significantly larger categories. It just looks weird.

TompaDompa

08:26:02 AM Jun 17th 2017

2000-4000-8000-16000 wouldn't make much a difference with regards to the main problem – that there are way too many entries. I'm honestly more inclined to go back to three categories and have them be 6000-12000-24000 (i.e. my original suggestion, except without the 3000 category).

GrafVonTirol

03:01:50 PM Jun 17th 2017

I'm inclined to agree that it should be at the 3000-6000-12000-24000 intervals. As seen on the sandbox just above, the 9000-12000 is tiny compared to the other categories surrounding it. To double the value of each interval would in theory provide a pyramid rather than a distorted shape.

In lieu of being able/willing to get the Python script to work and considering some of its outdated editorial decisions, I came up with my own method to weed out duplicate links for entries spanning multiple articles:

Copy the entire bulleted list on each page's Related To page and paste it into a single column in an Excel spreadsheet (I'm using Excel 2013). Make sure to hit the redirects, as while they're included in the count they aren't included on the list.

Select the column containing all the links.

On the Data tab, click Remove Duplicates.

Click OK.

You will get a message that says "X duplicate values found and removed; Y unique values remain." The latter number is the one you want.

This doesn't exclude any namespaces or specific pages, so it should produce a higher count than most other methods. But when I started using this method to check the numbers for entries on the 1450+ waiting list I found that my lists only cracked 1450 rows towards the very end of copying over all the links, before weeding out the duplicates, suggesting whoever calculated those numbers just straight-up added the Related to page's counts without doing anything to check for duplicates. So I would go through and give the list a major housecleaning, but a few things give me pause:

Earl of Sandvich was the one who made those calculations, bringing the numbers down from even more inflated counts, and he has entries on this discussion page dating back to 2011, early enough I would expect him to be using the Python script if he could. I want to make sure a naive adding of the link counts isn't what I'm supposed to be doing for whatever reason that's not evident from the page or the history, or that my method doesn't work for other reasons that escape me.

One reason I might be wrong is if the counts do weed out duplicates and I'm just not including enough pages, and it's just a coincidence that the first several entries I checked had sums of the related-to counts of the pages I checked that were close to or just above the full unduplicated counts. Two things make me worry that this might be the case: first, the Ultra Series came out to over 1700 rows before weeding out duplicates (and reached substantially over 1500 well before I hit any work current enough that one would expect it to have a substantial number of tropes added since the Earl's check), but once duplicates were weeded out it didn't even crack the Kilo Wick mark. Second, the references to "subpages" in some of the discussions below make me worry that I should have been including pages like Characters/ and Recap/. I would hope not, as besides being an insane amount of extra work it would imply that virtually every work popular enough to make this list would need to have multiple pages checked, and there isn't really any other direct evidence pointing to it, but I'm not totally confident in my ability to determine what pages to include myself right now.

I'm going to keep recalculating the numbers for what I suspect will be a good number of entries on the page and will start cleaning house if no one has any reasons my worries are justified, but I'm also not going to make any major changes based in a misunderstanding of how to calculate the link counts if I can help it.

After I went to check the waiting list and ultimately left the article untouched, I press save and all the examples under "Trope Saturated", "Smothered", and "Overloaded" are gone. There are only two examples under "Overdosed". I don't know what happened, because I didn't do anything.

SeptimusHeap

02:05:30 AM Jul 12th 2015

Reporting in forums.

TompaDompa

04:00:35 AM Jul 12th 2015edited by TompaDompa

I think I know what's up; the %% markup removes the entire line, not just what comes after it. It's an easy workaround (just place the comments on a separate line), but it's not supposed to be necessary.

Okay... so I did notice that the Cthulhu Mythos, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Slender Man Mythos has been added to this list a while back.

I wonder how all of these would be addressed; the MCU involves the films, many of which already lumped into separate entries so it can complicate things a little; the Slender Man Mythos doesn't seem that consistent iirc so quantifying the wicks according to what works can be considered can be a bit tricky. Kind of the same with Cthulhu, since we have quite a bit outside of Lovecraft's work...

I'm confused about what's going on with redirects. Say a manga has 1050 pages, and it's the target of two redirects with 482 pages and 107 pages respectively. There are no duplicated tropes. Would it count as Trope Overdosed?

(My apologies if this is a dumb question).

TompaDompa

06:27:00 PM Oct 13th 2012edited by TompaDompa

If it says 1050 pages, that includes the redirects. So it has a number of non-redirect wicks, 482 redirect wicks from one place and 107 redirect wicks from another place, for a total of 1050 wicks.

1)Some of the sub-entries of an entry can refer to a different size category (Example - Gundam Franchise as a whole is Trope Saturated while sub-entry refers to a single series of franchise as Overloaded)

2)Clause 1 requires either better-than-passing prior knowledge of the article, or some searching within the body of an article

I propose:

1)Add a short disambiguation at the beginning of the article, describing all the size categories numerically and naming them.

2)Leave the rest of the article (the headers of sub-categories of the trope, in particular) well enough alone, to remind anyone of the size limitations of category mentioned.

My impression is that the MCU shouldn't have its own entry on the list at all. I don't see The DCU, the Marvel Universe, or the DCAU on there. That said, I'm not sure there's really any rhyme or reason as to which shared universes get their own entries that sublimate their component series... for example, I think That Guy with the Glasses should be lumped together, but I don't have a good reason why that should be lumped together and the ones I just mentioned shouldn't be, aside from the fact that it doesn't do the site justice for it not to be represented on the list at all, while Batman is saturated on his own.

Huh, now that is what is meant here... a bit of a problem though, seeing as all the respective films aside from Thor have all been counted towards their respective franchises on this list.

And yeah, the wording to my reason would have been a lot better. I was thinking along the lines of "if we are to include this, we may as well include Disney Animated Canon as a single entry". To me that just didn't work that way.

Then again, this is kind of an interesting dilemma: how do you treat that which shows up in a "foreign" continuity? Does Alien vs. Predator belong to the Alien franchise, the Predator franchise, both franchises, or its own (I would argue both and its own)? Does Alien and Predator (or for that matter A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th) become a single franchise after the crossover, despite not being conceived that way (I would argue that they do not)?

Regardless, I don't think it should matter in this case. The films are meant to be viewed as a whole, without forcing it upon the viewers to keep up with one "sub-series" to understand another if they don't want to (kind of like how you don't have to read The Silmarillion to understand The Lord of the Rings, even though it certainly helps).

It's one thing to combine the wicks of different works of the same franchise, but I'm not quite so positive about doing so for sites like That Guy with the Glasses or ScrewAttack, particularly since there are different individuals contributing there, covering different niches (aside from site crossovers like Kickassia)

I wonder whether we should make a new category for those works which have 8000+ wicks. "Trope Oversaturated"?

Lightflame

03:46:55 PM Jun 16th 2012

I'm opposed to new categories, but if there was one I'd call it "Tropesplosion".

EarlOfSandvich

11:35:37 PM Jul 5th 2012edited by EarlOfSandvich

I'd be more inclined to change this to a 1500-3000-6000 interval, tbh, rather than to create a new category.

The interval increase sounds like a good idea actually, as long as there are others on board... fine as it is though.

TompaDompa

02:17:03 PM Jul 16th 2012edited by TompaDompa

Well, something should be done. Both Batman and Star Wars have north of 16000 wicks. That's more than four times the highest threshold, when each threshold is twice that of the previous one. Does that seem right to you?

Of course, at the bottom it says "No more categories, thanks. Maintaining these three is enough work." This doesn't preclude changing the thresholds, though. Moreover, creating a category requiring even more wicks wouldn't increase maintenance very much at all.

As it is now, I think the page is far too crowded. Seeing how this index is (presumably) supposed to be at least slightly exclusive, I think that changing it to 2000-4000-8000 would be the ideal solution. It would eliminate a lot of the content (although whether or not that's a good thing is debatable) and create a new, exclusive category without necessitating too much moving of content from one category to another (it would require counting the wicks of the 4000+ category, but not the others).

EarlOfSandvich

09:35:22 PM Jul 20th 2012

Perhaps that's something to be brought up to the workshop. Myself, I'm still on board with the 1500-3000-6000 intervals, and if we are to do four categories after all, having the 9000+ category for the big franchises (such as Batman and Star Wars) could work out.

Just a thought: TF 2 is currently is under Overloaded. Could someone perhaps look at how many trope pages reference TF 2 in concern to hats. Seems like the specification would be worthy of its own Trope Overdosed entry.

Or in retrospect and perhaps easier, how many trope pages reference TF 2 without mention of hats.

Hey guys, I have a suggestion, I think it would be a really good idea to divide the works on this page into separate "folders" (or whatever we call them) for different mediums. Y'know one for Film, one for Literature, one for Video Games, one for Anime and so on and so on, basically the same ones we use for other pages. And within the folders we can write which ones are Saturated, Overloaded or Overdosed. I'm just saying it would make the page *a lot* more manageable to read, because it's getting kind of difficult with how many new works are getting added. I hope you take my suggestion into account. Thank you.

There are a multiple works in the 1000-2000 section that don't have nearly as many wicks as are required. I noticed that Beauty and the Beast and The Beatles only have a couple hundred wicks each, so I'm wondering how many works listed are incorrect.

EarlOfSandvich

04:04:57 PM Feb 28th 2012edited by EarlOfSandvich

To answer your question, certain works alone wouldn't make the mark, but factor in multiple incarnations of a given series and you have yourself an overdosed work (so long as there's the sufficient wicks).

The Beatles WOULD make the mark, but it had linked to the Music namespace, whereas most of the wicks still remained at the Main/ namespace which is now being used as a disimbaguation. Even so, The Beatles is an artist page, not a work, so I'm not sure about even reinstating it.

In the case of Beauty and the Beast... yes, if you factor in all the namespaces of the related works of the same name (and especially the Disney adaptation), it is overdosed.

where the troupe's combined output wasn't counted together according to one edit, effectively leaving just Monty Python's Flying Circus as in the Overdosed category, where part of the reason is that the Monty Python entry was an author rather than a work/series

For the former, they are an influential band, but aside from the main page itself (which is in itself an artist page of sorts), there isn't any of their output that can reach this category.

For the latter, it is a collective website of several reviewers filling in various niches. I know they have intercontinuity crossovers, and not just in the anniversary specials, but would that be enough to keep the entire site on the Saturated category?

I'm kind of thinking: Half-Life and Portal are both within the same universe, yet play like different games (first person perspective aside). Out of curiousity, would they be classified as one (sending the Half-Life universe to the Overloaded catefory)?

Alynnidalar

10:16:01 PM Jul 22nd 2011

Also, by looking at the "related to" page, Half-Life gets 674 links while Half-Life has 1542. Adding them together, as both are equally valid names for the series, Half-Life has over 2000, so shouldn't it be bumped up a category anyway?

OldManHoOh

03:29:10 AM Jul 23rd 2011edited by OldManHoOh

No. No. I made that mistake before. Half-Life's final number includes that of the redirects.

EarlOfSandvich

03:17:22 AM Jul 24th 2011edited by EarlOfSandvich

Although I have to say that was rather odd, since the "Half Life" menu doesn't seem to specifically list "Half-Life" as a redirect...

And come to think... with acknowledgments and in-game references aside, there really isn't much of a connection between Half-Life and Portal, so... I'll just leave them as they are...

Is BlazBlue overdosed? I'm not familiar with the series, so I'm hesitant to add it, but it does have more than 1000 wicks, I think.

Benne

11:32:13 PM Jun 14th 2011

I'm not familiar with the series, but with over 1,000 wicks it definitely qualifies. Seeing that it's a Spiritual Successor to Guilty Gear (itself with over 700 wicks), I'll add it on the list under the Guilty Gear umbrella, which is standard procedure around here.

Grobi

04:57:46 AM Jun 15th 2011edited by Grobi

That's... not the best idea, I think. Just because they're Spiritual Successors, we should not lump two different franchises together.

I don't quite get the last changes. Neon Genesis Evangelion has (combined with Rebuild of Evangelion) more than 4000 entries, same goes for Mass Effect and its subpages (especially Mass Effect 2). There aren't any edit-reasons either. I'd like to revert these changes, however if someone is able to explain these edits (perhaps we did raise the wicks-minimum for saturated works and I just didn't get the memo...), that would be great.

Benne

12:11:06 AM May 25th 2011

Eva got moved back to Saturated, as it should. I'll do the same with Mass Effect.

Added Higurashi and Umineko to Trope Overdosed. Each has more than 1000 on its own. However, they might want to be combined into the When They Cry franchise. I'm not sure. Most of the time, the series are referred to independently, so I didn't do it. If we do put them together as When They Cry, they might need to be bumped up a rank. There's a good amount of overlap between the tropes, though, so I'm not certain.

Grobi

10:17:55 AM Apr 29th 2011

Deleted; like Paper Mario, Persona, Final Fantasy etc., they're part of a bigger franchise already on this list. Won't mind putting them to Saturated, though (only if they fit, of course).

I added Batman: The Animated Series to the list as an independent entry, separate from the all-encompassing Batman which is actually the very first entry right now (Yay alphabet!) because it earned the position all on its own, with ~1,500 links by itself to its own page. However, I'm wondering if the "The DCAU" should also be added.

The page for the DCAU does not qualify, it only has ~500 links to itself, but if you count all the pages for shows that are in the DCAU you've got over 4,000 not even counting the original Batman series; with B:TAS it goes to over 5,500, and I haven't even gotten into the movies yet, not to mention the "Do they count or not" shows.

Should the DCAU be added as a whole, or not? I can think of arguments either way (It's one single shared universe, like Star Wars, but it's also divided up into separate and independent work pages).

EDIT: Oh, and according to Google DCAU appears on at least 2,800 pages, so I guess it does qualify all on its own.

Benne

11:30:48 PM Mar 16th 2011

This is a debate worth having. I think the DCAU is overdosed enough to be on the list, but is having so much of the universe involved with Batman and Superman, with their own over-arching entries, enough to keep it off? Or are the variousJustice League entries enough to make it qualify?

I'm pretty sure EarthBound should be on this list because it has at least 1000 'related's (and not because my growing obsession with this game is making me an Entry Pimp what gave you that idea), but I don't want to put it in the wrong place... which category should it go in?

OldManHoOh

05:01:06 PM Feb 19th 2011

The series doesn't really have a "superseries" page, unlike, say The Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros., which kind of complicates things. But yes, if it has 1000+ relateds it goes.

Grobi

02:09:00 PM Apr 24th 2011

Someone really needs to create a Franchise-page; I'd do it myself - but I never even played these games (I'm German, so: No Export For Me).

Would the collective works of Shakespeare be an acceptable entry? I'm certain that his works constitute at least an Overload, maybe a Saturated, all together, but I'm wondering if common authorship is an acceptable excuse for grouping.

UBourgeois

09:32:22 AM Nov 29th 2010

For reference, the page for William Shakespeare has 1228 references, while his plays collectively have 3052, which would make him either Overloaded or Saturated, depending on how you count it.

OldManHoOh

09:43:04 AM Nov 29th 2010

Considering they're only linked through an author, I'd say no.

UBourgeois

09:56:31 AM Nov 29th 2010

It's just that Shakespeare is such a literary giant and his works are identified almost more often as a Shakespeare play than works in their own right. Plus, something seems right about having Shakespeare in the Saturated section.

Goldfritha

05:42:04 PM Dec 2nd 2010

Why should being linked through an author not make them saturated? It would be unusual to be sure, but that's because he has a unusual number of links.

(Having checked the old page, I will note, however, that Terry Pratchett and some others also qualify by that criterion.)

Just because a group of works have a common author doesn't make them in the same series. It has to be connected in some canon ways. Each of the plays should be listed individually, if there are any of his works that is Trope Overdosed that is.

I was thinking of adding Homestuck to Overloaded, but then I thought maybe I should just add MS Paint Adventures as an entry, despite the fact that Homestuck is Overloaded in its own right and none of the others are. Thoughts?

OldManHoOh

02:54:24 PM Sep 12th 2010

I think MS Paint Adventures is the right entry to add if Homestuck is a subset of it.

I think its time to up the qualification numbers for each, or add a new, larger category on top- considering that apparently there's room for a gap of over 8,000 wicks embedded in the current largest category, I think there's some room to break things up.

OldManHoOh

10:57:10 AM Aug 16th 2010

Should we move the minimum qualification for Overdosed up?

SchizoTechnician

11:00:08 AM Aug 16th 2010

If we do, we'd need to move the minimum qualification for everything up, or there would be too large a gap.

OldManHoOh

11:09:07 AM Aug 16th 2010

Kind of what I meant.

SchizoTechnician

11:13:55 AM Aug 16th 2010

right...
The question is, do we want to continue having the minimum bar at 1000? If we do, we should just add a larger category on top, about 8000, I'd say. If not, we have to work out how to change the categories, geometric or arithmetic and the quantities by which to multiply each category- maybe even logarithmic, with the lower categories getting a smaller increase in minimums...

I think adding an 8000 category is the least labor-intensive measure, and requires the least debate and deliberation.

OldManHoOh

11:28:29 AM Aug 16th 2010

The %comments% in the page says that there should be no more than three sections. Should we remove the 1000+ section?

SchizoTechnician

11:34:05 AM Aug 16th 2010

huh... didn't notice that. Makes things easier

In that case, yeah, I'd just go multiplicative X2 and go with 2000, 4000, and 8000.

Game_Fan

07:00:27 PM Aug 17th 2010

Where does the idea that there are things that hit the 8000 level coming from? I just went through all of the stuff in the 4000+ part and only a few things have even hit 6000 and least one (Stargate) doesn't even reach 1000 hits.

Perhaps 8000 is too high. The problem is, if you look at the page history of Old Man Ho Oh's edits, at least two series do go beyond it. And any category containing examples more than twice the quantity of things in the same category is a little too broad for accuracy, the genesis of the idea of a fourth category in the first place.

And the top category only had five or less until recently, remember. Its sudden stuffiness is what prompted the idea of changing requirements.

Goldfritha

06:03:35 PM Dec 6th 2010

Create a new category and you create incentive to Entry Pimp more stuff into it.

OldManHoOh

06:11:40 PM Dec 6th 2010

As pointed out before, there's a warning in place not to outright add a new category. No idea what the rules are for inflating the pre-existing one.

What we're talking about is the recognition that it's more impressive when Firefly (13 episodes, 1 movie, maybe a few comix) gets Trope Overdosed than when something like Star Trek (which has six series, four of which have over 100 episodes, as well as 11 movies) does.

That is, the ratio of amount of work to tropes listed for the work.

We used to routinely note how many items might be creating the links, but our sole formal acknowledgment was having a separate category for films that had fewer than two sequels — which by definition should be harder to overdose than most other media.

Doing this properly would range from difficult to impossible. Perhaps we could measure TV by the episode, or by the hour; if we do it by the hour, we might be able to make a comparison between TV, film, and videogames, which are all part of the recording arts. Printed media — literature and comics — would go by the page. But there is no good way to compare films and TV with books and comics. Okay, maybe you could use the audiobook to convert books to hours, assuming you can find an unabridged one. But nobody's gonna make an audio graphic novel!

insofar

08:56:39 PM May 10th 2010

Yeah, that used to be part of this page already. Fast Eddie cut it, so if anything, it would need to be a separate article.

Using the above methodology I've demoted Final Fantasy to Trope Overloaded, as a body text search of Final Fantasy yields only 2864 hits, compared to a "related to" search yielding 1649 hits, implying that a lot of Final Fantasy references on the wiki are duplicated across games.

I'm moving Batman up to the Trope Saturated section. The Main/Batman page has over 2000 wicks, Batman: The Animated Series has over 1000 wicks, and all of the other comics, movies, and shows more than make up for the other 1000, including Batman Beyond's 600+, Batman: Arkham Asylum's 200+, The Dark Knight Saga's 150+, the Adam West Series' 200, and The Joker's 197. And note: I'm rounding down, to account for redundant wicks (i.e. pages referencing each other, the character sheet, tropes with the name Batman in them, etc). And that still leaves hundreds of wicks for all the individual comics like The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns. I'm noting the change here in case anyone wants to despute me, but I think it's time The Goddamn Batman took his rightful place among the most Trope Overdosed franchises.

SomeGuy

04:43:33 PM Apr 29th 2010edited by SomeGuy

Actually, it occurs to me that with a series like Batman, we could probably get an accurate Trope Overdosed count by using a body text search (found in the Tools sidebar). Any article that references Batman will probably include his name at some point, and since body text search is a single search function, we wouldn't get any duplicates.

...Body text search yields 4628 articles, so Batman is good for Trope Saturated. For future reference, we're doing it alphabetically now, so that means it goes to the top. Also, there's nothing stopping you from adding more description after the BatmanPot Hole.

I've changed this page, at the risk of seriously pissing some people off. I've played with this trope in the Wiki Sandbox, and try as I might I simply can't figure out how or if this list works. So far as I can tell the % signatures don't do anything, and rank is based entirely off of the order the works in question are listed. Considering this page is commonly used as a gauge by outsiders for determining what works are the most popular on the wiki this is unacceptable. We might as well not have the page at all if there's no way to objectively verify how many wiks a work actually has.

As a baseline I only used the single page for each series I thought was most likely to carry the highest number of wiks, and spelled those numbers out in bold so they can be clearly verified. Other users can gather more specific counts, say including non-duplicated redirects and post them at their leisure. This system is far from perfect, but since it deals with counts that can at least be verified I consider it an improvement.

One wiki tech feature that would help a great deal in making this page accurate would be a tool that allows us to put more than one WikiWord into the "related to" engine. This would allow us, for example, to figure out how many Star Trek: The Next Generation wiks exist independently of Star Trek wiks, so that we don't overestimate the counts due to duplicated tropes.

All of this assumes, of course, that my investigation and conclusions regarding the former formatting of this page are accurate. If my hypotheses are incorrect and the formatting was doing something to verify the accuracy of the listings, I have a request for the Admins- Not in the Face!!

insofar

01:58:54 AM Apr 27th 2010

"We might as well not have the page at all if there's no way to objectively verify how many wiks a work actually has."

There is a way - it's just that it's manual rather than automatic. On the whole, I think cutting the entire list is a little too trigger happy. Raising the qualifying threshold seems like a better idea, and leaves the page less bare = prettier.

Belian

06:30:38 AM Apr 27th 2010edited by Belian

I understand what you are saying. For most of the entries finding the number of Wicks is easy: Just use the "reference to..." at the top of the page. But that is not all there is to it. YOU come up with the correct number of Wicks for Star Trek or Star Wars. And then tell us how you found them. If you figure out a reasonable way to get those numbers, it can be applied to the rest of the entries.

SomeGuy

11:08:55 AM Apr 27th 2010

A bit of an update here- most of what I wrote before is moot, as Fast Eddie completely redid the page a few minutes after I finished writing up that discussion post. The rubric has been changed so that there's no numbered ranks, just an alphabetical listing of all works that fall under the numerical threashold. This means that anyone can add a new series to the list if it meets the mathematical requirement (Family Guy and Code Geass quickly come to mind as series that qualify but aren't currently up there, as well as Harry Potter for possibly being Trope-Saturated as opposed to Trope-Overdosed), and that we don't hyperventilate about which series is x amount of wiks more popular than the other.

I still believe that keeping exact numbers of how many pages reference a series would be a pitifully simple task if we were allowed to put more than one WikiWord into the "related to" search function, but at least now this page has a rubric that's far more easily understood.

insofar

12:45:30 PM Apr 27th 2010edited by insofar

Aye. I was just thinking of retaining the third category while changing its parameters (1000-2000 wicks for example), since that's still quite a large number of references to have. Basically, it would keep the current format of the page, but expand it to include the "overdosed" category.

BrightBlueInk

02:52:12 PM Apr 27th 2010

I'd like that, I sorta miss the "overdosed" category. Plus it seems odd to cut that category out when that's what the trope is named.

Game_Fan

07:50:06 PM Apr 27th 2010edited by Game_Fan

Three levels seems more reasonable.

Trope Overdosed (4000+)

Trope Saturated (2000+)

Trope Loaded (1000+) (because that's still a huge number of hits)

I support the alphabetical organization over numerical order.

A quick check of the list suggests a need to reorganize it and shows just how difficult this will be. Avatar The Last Air Bender only gets 18 hits by the proscribed method. OOTS just 1708.

insofar

08:04:49 PM Apr 27th 2010edited by insofar

Doing an unpunctuated 'related to' search on Avatar: The Last Airbender gives you over 2000 wicks. But I'm not so much concerned with the technicalities as with the purpose of the page.

If, as Some Guy said, the article is meant to catalogue the popular titles for people's convenience, I think it'd be a good idea to feature more than the already well-known and mainstream works that are on the page right now. Having a third category of popular examples could give exposure to works that are immensely popular on the wiki while perhaps being too niche to be household names, which is what I think people would be looking for in this article.

I think a good start point would be reviewing the Overdosed list that got deleted, and prune the examples that don't reach (as of yet) the 1000+ minimum. There would probably be other works that meet the criterion that aren't listed, but those can be added as we find them.

SomeGuy

08:11:50 PM Apr 27th 2010

That's part of what makes this funky- accurate counts require not just checking the main page related counts, but also redirects. The non-p-title Avatar: The Last Airbender scores 2284 hits because it's the one most commonly potholed. It also makes things like a manual count of Final Fantasy nearly impossible- you'd not only have to add the dozen odd title in the series up, you'd also have to calculate how many are duplicates, since Final Fantasy can only use, say, Mysterious Waif once for the sake of this tabulation even though five separate Final Fantasy games are mentioned on that page.

You have to use this bar in order to gather counts on redirects- put the title in question after the last slash.

insofar

08:16:16 PM Apr 27th 2010

Besides that, are there any objections to restoring the third category?

Hey! I didn't delete those! Seriously, none of those were there when I took my first stab at the page. I think it was modified into the "top 35 trope-gathering shows" form long before I showed up. Everyone seems to agree that defining this trope by wiks is much better than by rank, especially in lieu of a method to tabulate duplicates.

I think if we add folder control to this page there will be no objections if we re-institute the 1000+ wiks category.

Frank75

06:35:48 AM May 7th 2010

At first: Fasten your seatbelt please, this is gonna be a bumpy ride.

Seriously guys, I feel really cheated. In the past I did a lot of work to keep Trope Overdosed up to date, but now it looks like this has been for nothing.

I even had written a Python script to calculate exact numbers for each page, which also sorts out duplicates, JBM, WMG and Contributor pages.

As said, I've put a lot of effort in maintaining this page. Nobody bothered to tell me what you were up to.

SomeGuy

12:07:17 PM May 7th 2010edited by SomeGuy

Come on now. It's not like we knew you were gonna be into it or something. Have you ever tried using the watchlist feature? That would tell you whenever your favorite pages are being edited, and you could swoop down with your Python to save us all.

I've put up a methodology listing to tell us basic qualifications, but feel free to put up your own if you've devised a better formula than I have.

Incidentally, I've redefined Trope Overdosed to be at the "above 2000 below 3000" threshold, since the list seems a bit long. It makes a lot more sense to define these categories by even thousands, considering there's an excessive bit of difference between a work with 2050 wiks and 3900 of them that we really should reflect in the tabulation.

insofar

04:05:08 PM May 7th 2010edited by insofar

If you're going by increments that double the previous number, 1000-2000 and 2000-4000 categories make perfect sense. 1000 wicks is a lot, and the point of the page is to categorize, not to try its hardest to avoid categorizing.

It does look neater now, at any rate.

ExplodingFrogs

10:26:33 PM May 8th 2010edited by ExplodingFrogs

Agreed. The whole point of this page is to acknowledge which shows have an unusually high number of wicks; eliminating everything below 2000 makes absolutely no sense in that regard. Do you honestly believe the likes of The Dresden Files, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Mass Effect, and Disgaea don't count as Overdosed? That's more than enough wicks for it be difficult to find a page that doesn't reference them. Trope Overdosed should include works with 1000 wicks and up.

Belian

11:13:26 PM May 8th 2010edited by Belian

Looking back at what it was before the exact counts were dropped, it was:

Film Overdosed: (Number of references for a single film (or with one sequel) — trilogies and longer series should have enough material to be a candidate for the main Overdosed list above — 80 reference minimum) (with over 100)

IMO, we should have all the categories with some modifications to the # of Wicks. Saturated would still be 4000+, Overloaded would be 2500-4000, Overdosed 1000-2500 (a compromise of previous comments), Film 200+, Creator 150+. And all categories, from Overdosed down, would be folder-ed to lower the page length.

How does that sound?

ExplodingFrogs

12:23:23 AM May 9th 2010

As far as making new categories goes: NOOOOOOO. Three is more than enough.

About my script: To get an accurate number of wicks for for works where you have to add up wicks for several pages, you click each of the links for this work, and then at "related". You look at the source code of the HTML page, scroll down, and copy the line that starts with "<div class="wmglead" ><span style="color:chocolate;". (It's often a very long line, because it contains all the wicks, but treat it as a single one.) Copy this line (for each file) into a simple .txt file, and save it when you did this for all the links. Afterwards, you simply run the python script and check what it says about individual results.

That's it. It's still a bit of work, but it automatically removes the JBM/WMG/Troper pages, and also all the duplicates. Using this, I got the 4000+ wicks for Final Fantasy, and the other results.

insofar

02:47:09 PM May 10th 2010

I'm also not in favor of restoring the original categories. Three is perfectly fine. I just think the thresholds need to be adjusted.

SomeGuy

03:14:15 PM May 10th 2010edited by SomeGuy

I'm unconvinced that 1000 hits is a reasonable threshold. It was back when we first started this page, but that was when the wiki was way younger and a work having that many hits was unusual. It seems foolhardy to me to define the categories on this page in such a way that it just becomes an index of every work of fiction, ever, especially when so many of them are just flat listings without capsule descriptions.

Anyway, Frank, I don't think I using all that much Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, but to simplify- I put words on the page saying how we determine the numbers. Your Python script sounds interesting, though. I find it very believable that we're lowballing the Final Fantasy numbers using the current estimates. I recommend you keep pursuing Fast Eddie on this point. Explain to him, as an example, how I can't verify the Final Fantasy series having more than 2800 wiks using current wiki tools but your script apparently can.

If you have this page on your watchlist now, as I suggested, you could at least convince Fast Eddie to let you act as Page Guardian, a term I totally made up just now to refer to people who scrutinize edits to specific pages. Since you're the only one with access to the script, you presumably have a better ability to determine accurate wik counts than the rest of us do. We don't need exact numbers, but we could still use ballpark estimates.

ExplodingFrogs

05:56:22 PM May 10th 2010edited by ExplodingFrogs

It still is unusual. There are hundreds—maybe even thousands—of works on this wiki that are nowhere near 1000 wicks. Yes, there are substantially more shows that have managed this than have managed 2000 or 4000 wicks—this will be true of any similar list. The greater the quantity of something that must be accumulated to qualify for a a category, the fewer things will be capable of qualifying for that category. It is The Way Things Work. Expecting an even distribution throughout the categories demonstrates a severely flawed understanding of statistics and probability.

insofar

07:08:11 PM May 10th 2010edited by insofar

"I'm unconvinced that 1000 hits is a reasonable threshold."

To go ahead and delete a bunch of example because you are personally unconvinced when more people are in favor of a 1000 threshold is kind of... well, rude. At least consult other users, like the rest of us are doing?

SomeGuy

07:53:48 PM May 10th 2010

This is a fair point- I deleted them in part because I saw in the page history that Fast Eddie was the one who initially deleted them, and was likely to do so again the next time he saw the page. So, I figured I'd at least keep the Trope Overdosed classification by redefining it in such a way that the examples would not be considered forfeit, with the added bonus that the eight more highly referenced works now have a hierarchical position more coherent with their overall usage.

It might help to look at things this way- what is the purpose of Trope Overdosed? We already know it's not a wik-measuring contest because Fast Eddie has decreed that outright. I doubt that it's supposed to be a long list of works that use tropes for the same reason. So, what the heck is it?

Here's what I've always assumed it to be- it's a page explaining why why certain works have such a ridiculously large number of wiki references. This list has to maintain some exclusivity, or it becomes a meaningless garble of every semi-popular work we have. Everything above the 2000 wik threshold has a capsule description explaining why the large number of references. What does it help to list a bunch of works that have 1000+ wiks, but no capsule description, and which don't seem all that disproportionately popular compared to the several dozen other shows in the same category?

insofar

08:09:45 PM May 10th 2010

Well, I can neither speak for Fast Eddie nor the creator of the page, whoever it might have been, but it serves to note which fandoms are popular across this site. If we stick to the highest of the thresholds, we will only come up with Lord of the Rings, Batman, Harry Potter, and stuff that is already part of the mainstream. If we spread it out to include more examples, works that are more niche would get exposure as well.

The list already has exclusivity. You are vastly underestimating the number of Works on this wiki.

Regarding the shows without capsule descriptions: they had capsule descriptions before being deleted. Wiki Magic would, presumably, ensure that they would have them again.

To put it bluntly, you jumped the gun and "solved" a problem that didn't actually exist. Certainly not as far as anyone other than yourself was concerned. This is not a basis on which to make such a big change to the page. Fast Eddie gets to make those kinds of decisions unilaterally because he's a mod—don't try to do his job for him. That way lies only Edit War.

SomeGuy

09:44:41 PM May 10th 2010edited by SomeGuy

I did solve one problem that actually existed- the conflating of the 2050 wik work with the 3800 wik work. It still strikes me as very silly that for the sake of tabulation we were considering works with roughly the twice the exposure of those below them as being like entities.

The Trope Overdosed section at present is about one page scroll long. I think that's about as long as one of these sections can get before we run into tldr. Any longer and it just looks like an index with a hodge-podge of works from across the board. I'd argue that the 2000+ Trope Overdosed section has about as good a cross-section of popular/niche as we'd get from 1000+ anyway going by percentages. Avatar, Nanoha, and Order Of The Stick are not what I'd call "mainstream popular", nor would I say that of Buffy or Warhammer.

I do agree on one point- I don't have authority in the sense Fast Eddie does, but I consider it more than likely that he would have simply deleted the entries again anyway. Be that as it may, this really is getting to be a lengthy, forum-style discussion. I've written my piece- take it as you will, but I'm done here. Belian has the right idea- further discussion should take place in the forums. That's your best chance at reaching a consensus that won't be discarded by administrative fiat.

insofar

09:56:21 PM May 10th 2010

Any list is going to be tldr. That's just the nature of the beast. This page, as far as I can see, serves to catalog - and if we're not cataloging anything but the already known and mainstream works, what is the point of the page then?

Frank75

06:12:39 AM May 11th 2010

Some things, in no particular order:

1. @Some Guy: I have a watchlist, but I don't check it every day. Especially not for a page like Trope Overdosed, which I used to update... not every other week.

2. Trope Overdosed was supposed to be about pages which have a lot of tropes. Theoretically, with the new page categorization system we may even find a way to calculate how many wicks from tropes (as opposed to other pages) a work really gets. It was never supposed to measure what the mainstream likes, since tropers may have other preferations. And while I'm not a Buffy fan myself, we maybe shouldn't forget that this wiki started with Buffy, AFAIK.

3. Yep, the list was pretty long at the end. IMO justified though - TV Tropes nowadays has more than 50k pages. Of course Trope Overdosed is going to be longer than it was when the wiki just had 5k pages. As a personal guess, Trope Overdosed may double its length if the wiki becomes four times bigger (rule of square).

4. The change still came pretty fast. Shouldn't we have discussed this at least for three days before, like for a YKTTW?

5. If people want to expand the list in the future, they may want to check pages first which were cut now from the list. So I made Archive.Trope Overdosed (essentially the old list before the cut) to allow people this.

Belian

08:09:57 AM May 11th 2010

1.Understandable

2 and 3. I like your logic

4. You would have to talk to Some Guy and/or Fast Eddie. I brought up the issue of it being out of date in the forums, this solution was proposed, and within the day acted on. Though not without some thought on the matter.

5. I'll be adding that archive link to the main page now. Much easier then going down through the history to find the information.

ExplodingFrogs

12:41:22 PM May 11th 2010edited by ExplodingFrogs

So, what I'm getting from this is that Some Guy is actually the only one who wanted the Overdosed category to require more than 1000 hits, and he's also the only one against changing it back to 1000+. Is that correct?

Belian

01:06:47 PM May 11th 2010edited by Belian

Mostly yes, but these sorts of questions are exactly why I keep trying to move the conversation to the forum ;-)

"...this really is getting to be a lengthy, forum-style discussion. I've written my piece- take it as you will, but I'm done here. Belian has the right idea- further discussion should take place in the forums. That's your best chance at reaching a consensus that won't be discarded by administrative fiat.

ExplodingFrogs

01:21:39 PM May 11th 2010edited by ExplodingFrogs

...Perhaps this discussion has caused a certain amount of bias for me, but I'm inclined to take anything Some Guy says about admins with a grain of salt. More importantly, that thread seems to have died, whereas this discussion is still active.

Edit: Apparently, I spoke too soon.

Darkmane

01:39:39 AM Aug 3rd 2010edited by Darkmane

@ Belian:

There is a simple way to accurately determine the number of references: Just Use Google.

Go to Google (advanced search), type the name of the show in the This exact wording or phrase column, then, in the Search within site or domain column put "http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/". (Don't just put "http://tvtropes.org/" 'cause if so the search will spit out forum threads, discussion pages, and every other useless bit of data that doesn't count.)

The result will show the exact number of tropes used by the show referenced here.

Does Wikipedia really belong here? That isn't a franchise of fictional/semi-fictional stories, that's a webpage that's tvtropes but less specific and more professional. Plus, more than half of the references are probably just in the "according to Wikipedia"-vein.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy